The Enthusiast (8 page)

I
had my own America going, a huge room lined with doors. Behind each door was an enthusiasm, a noisy roomful of slang, spending, sanctioning bodies, factional intrigues, and Freddy Pasco–like stars who walked like gods in that room and like toner salesmen everywhere else. Most people went through only a few of those doors in their lives, but I crashed one wild party after another and came back for more.

There was always a reason to change jobs. The paychecks bounced or were so small they cleared, or the magazines merged, my career keeping pace with the golden age of cutbacks. If I didn't get along with someone I was always the one to leave. Why should an enthusiast go and a civilian stay? All those hang gliders, storm chasers, and battle reenactors had found a way to stop time that I hadn't, but I had a vocation watching them do it.

 

D
ad got lucky on the escalator. Exploring the mall on his break from the salad bar, he spotted a Franklin Covey store that sold motivational books and time-management systems to the determined. He walked in, got talking with the manager, and a few visits later he was hired to work the floor.

The customers could tell he'd once fought his way to the middle, and he clicked right away. Soon he was giving store-sponsored seminars where people came to a hotel meeting room and took down what he said in action-item binders he'd sold them. He would mention that he'd once managed forty scientists, say “
Talk
about herding cats,” and move another eight hundred dollars in product right there in the room. Barney softened up a little toward me on our phone calls, though it might not have been because of Dad's new job. Deirdre was pregnant.

The day Dad gave his first seminar I was working at
Country Ways
in Destination, Nebraska, editing a farmer's article about hip lock during calving. Around the passage
Think of this in lieu of how you would feel if someone were to put a couple of forceps on you and yank you straight out of the vulva. You would squeal with justification!
, I decided I needed coffee.

I took a chance, going over to the wood stove that heated the Editorial Department's half of the barn and shaking the enamel percolator. It didn't slosh, and there were witnesses, so I had to make a new pot. Country ways meant sustainable farming, energy independence, and colon health, but above all self-reliance.

I put on my coat, scarf, gloves, and galoshes, got a cup and a pail and walked out into the snow. When I'd arrived in the fall the air had been filled with the strong contradictory smells
of cider, pigsties, alfalfa, baking, organic fertilizer, and thrip-fighting garlic. Now there was only the cold, which sprung my eyes and mouth open like I was hearing bad news over and over.

I went into the main house and stumbled to the pantry with my glasses fogged up. Someone had roasted coffee beans, saving me twenty minutes of fire-building and cranking. I filled the cup with them, pumped well-water into the pail, and went back outside. Crossing a tractor path, my boot broke through ice into mud and I almost lost the coffee beans.

Rudy, from Circulation, was smoking a cigarette in front of the barn. “Coffee,” he said. “Good man. Is there milk?”

I nodded. “Jesse milked.”

Irena, from Art, came out shivering in two sweaters and a watch cap pulled low. “Oh, Henry, you're great,” she said. “Coffee. That's arduous. Rudy, can I have a cigarette?”

He gave her one. She lit it, took a drag, and said, “These are good.”

“Thanks,” Rudy said. “Yeah, you know what it was before? I was curing it too hot.”

I went back inside, made coffee, finished calving, and started on worming. My computer ran out of solar at three and I had to pedal the bicycle generator for twenty minutes to get it back up.

On my way out after work I passed the ad sales guys having a sorrel wine happy hour. “Now, he was a man,” one of them was saying. “He could sell two pages to a stranger at a cattle auction. I've seen him do it one time.” They raised the jar at me, but I said no thanks. I had to attend a class outside.

My third day there, I'd gotten lost on the farm roads and come in late. Thad Anderson, who owned both the farm and the magazine, had responded by putting me in charge of the “Survive It Yourself” column, written by a retired forest ranger
in Montana. Every Friday Thad gave a wilderness lesson to me and whoever else was interested. So far we'd covered edible weeds and learned how to improvise splints and poultices.

Tonight there were five of us. Thad shined his flashlight at the Big Dipper on a star map and said, “Somebody show me that in the sky.” He was fifty and barrel shaped, in overalls, canvas coat, and Carl Perkins hair.

Rick, from Production, pointed at the sky. “Okay,” Thad said. “You go up from those two stars on the edge of the cup, about five times as far as they are from each other, and there's the North Star. Everyone got it?”

I nodded, but I could never pick out constellations or understand how the ancient audience had convinced themselves they were up there. My mind was on dinner at the Indian taco place in Destination's two-block downtown, where it would be warm.

“Good,” Thad said. “And that'll always be north.” He drew a circle in the snow with his finger. “Say you want to go east. The star's north, so east is here.” He poked a hole in the snow. “You start walking, and you keep checking on that star as you go, so you stay in one direction. Every year you hear about some guy that died half a mile from the trail, just going around in circles.”

 

T
he cold eased up a few weeks later, and Thad gave a morning woodlore lesson wearing fleece instead of down. “It's false spring, but I'll take it,” he said, showing Rudy and me how to find directions in the daytime by putting a wristwatch on the ground and sticking a twig into the dirt beside it.

“The stick makes a shadow so you can line up the sun with the hour hand,” Thad said. “Halfway between the hands is
south.” I wrote it down, and when I looked up from my pad he met my eyes. “I'm afraid I've got some bad news here, Henry. We're going to have to let a few people go.”

I nodded. I was used to layoffs, and as the last hired I'd be the first to leave.

“Haven't had the greatest circulation this year,” Thad said.

“Some years it starts shooting up in April, and by June you can't believe the size of it. It's from people in cities, thinking, ‘What in God's name are we doing sitting here in traffic for five hours to go to the seashore? Oughta buy some land and put up a dome.'”

“Newsstand gets up to here,” Rudy said, stretching his arm toward the sky. “This wasn't one of those years, though.”

“Well, it's weather,” Thad said. “Everything's weather.”

I told them not to worry about it, and after lunch I went home to start calling around for work. Four days later I was in Trask, Oklahoma, shaking hands with Dean Laswell.

“Hell, did I go and hire you?” he greeted me. “Your résumé sounds like a man of experience, but you're a kid. You're from the kiddie brigade. You're a young kid.”

He owned and edited
The Short Sheet
, a monthly for shortwave radio enthusiasts, and had written thirty-two books about medical breakthroughs being kept from the public, the hard science proving that all NASA missions were faked, and the unconstitutionality of child support. Laswell published the books himself and sold them by mail to conspiracy buffs and easily amused college kids. He was in his loud, hearty sixties and came to work every day in green corduroy pants and an
ARMY
sweatshirt. Like one of my professors at Los Nietos, he wore a full beard and no moustache, a look that Gerald said “puts the ‘Amish' in ‘squeamish.'” Everything in the office, down to the pencils, had
STOLEN FROM DEAN LASWELL
printed on it.

The first nine pages of every
Short Sheet
were devoted to Laswell's editorials, which mentioned shortwave only occasionally. They were illustrated with photos of Laswell trying to look pensive, taken by Perry the one-man art department, a scowling burnout whose previous credit was airbrushing T-shirts on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach.

Between the editorials and his books, Laswell wrote thirty pages a day. The shortwave radio was always on, its high-frequency squeals sawing at my brainstem as I fought it out with his spelling and punctuation.

A “new world order”?
Laswell wrote.
Sorry, no joy. Try “invisible old order” and you're a-speak-a my language, pilgrims. All the agencies that have their greasy thumbs in this thing, from the Joint Chiefs on over to the Federal Reserve, are shot through with 33rd-degree Masons, straight up the chain of command—you could look it up. A secret handshake is one thing, campers. A secret stranglehold is a whole 'nother kettle of grouper.
His assistant, Cheryl, forty and pale, talked nonstop about recipes, the weather, and Brinkman's department store having some nice things but being way over in Crowder's Ridge, distracting me from the shortwave that distracted me from work.

Laswell got up every half hour to change the station, skipping past the Catalan Friendship Hour to the ranters in the clandestine part of the shortwave band. In a good week he pulled in Freemen, militias, survivalists, income-tax deniers, Holocaust deniers, moon-shot deniers, dollar-bill decipherers, and a lady who hated the Bureau of Weights and Measures. His favorite was a guy with a flat western accent and a colleague named Ernie, who either was off mike or didn't exist.

“Big news story, Ernie,” the guy said one day. “This is all they're talking about. One of these white-coat boys was in his lab, somebody mailed him a little present, and the present blew
up on him. Feebs thinks this guy Freebird did it, but there's a lot of these lone rangers out here, it could be—what, Ernie? Ernie thinks I'm talking about the guy that had Tonto. No, this—these are people, they're working on their own hook, okay? Not mixers. No one can tell on 'em 'cause nobody knows.

“But these white-coat boys, they're getting called to account now. They've been working on all these fun deals like cloning animals and tracking everyone's whereabouts, and the sheeple out there, they see that white coat, they don't ask any questions. That's science, okay; leave that alone. Only guy I ever see in a white coat's the doctor. You see that white coat, the rubber glove's not far behind, it's
right
behind. That's what
all
these boys are up to. Quit laughing, Ernie. This is serious business here.”

I bought a newspaper on the way home. A mail bomb had been sent to a human genome sequencing lab, killing the lead computer programmer. The front-page photo of cratered lab benches and fried instruments looked like Barney's room at home after an airstrike on Rancho Cahuenga. Freebird was suspected, but there'd been no communiqué yet.

I went online, where Freebird was an industry. First I found the chat rooms where people said they agreed with his theories but deplored his methods, and then, with a sinking feeling of discovery, the ones where people said his methods were the part that rocked.

It wasn't just Freebird or the shortwave guy who hated the white-coat boys. There was one website after another about scientists playing God and enslaving the trusting sheeple. I thought of the kids at the science fair in Chicago, the ones Barney relaxed around, who got giggly talking about nonferrous magnets. They were guileless, a bunch of absentminded professors in waiting, the mildest crowd of enthusiasts I'd ever seen overrun a Marriott. Whose enemy could they be?

Someone's. The bright boys were concocting designer plagues, I read, cloning livers for rich drunks and heating up the climate so the usual bankers could snap up the failed farms. They needed a good shot to the head. They needed their names and home addresses listed online, with a line through the genome guy who'd gotten the bomb, a list that kept getting shut down till it moved to a server in a no-questions-ocracy where free speech was still for sale. Barney wasn't on the list, but was that Asian name the polypeptide girl from the science fair, or that Jewish one the Bronx Science guy, the kids we'd run down the stairwells with?

I had a hobby. I hated looking but I kept going back, night after night. Only a few people could have believed the doctrines on my screen, but how many did you need?

I called Barney. He said, “Yeah, we got a thing that said to verify packages before we open them. They had security guys at the last few conferences. I don't know what else you can do.” I called the FBI, too, to ask if they were seeing what I was. The bored lady at the 800 number took down what I told her, but answered my questions by telling me what information they didn't give out until I felt like a bad pet named Sir.

 

T
wo weeks later I arrived for work at
The Short Sheet
and found Cheryl and Perry out in the hall looking at a padlocked door and a notice saying the premises had been secured by the Sheriff's Department for nonpayment of debts. Cheryl turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “They've silenced him.”

I hadn't realized she was a believer. I thought Perry would snort at her, but he nodded in solemn agreement. “Did he say who we should call if this happened?” Cheryl said.

I pictured a red phone ringing inside a hollow mountain, the secret headquarters of the crank command. I shook my head. “He said to just walk away,” I said, with a gravity I didn't have to fake because I was out three weeks' pay.

I went home, called around, and found a job. A few days later I was packing up my apartment when the phone rang.

“Henry Bay?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bay, this is the fourth phone number we've called in our attempts to reach you. It seems you've been moving a great deal. That won't protect you from meeting your obligations, Mr. Bay. When we have a matter to collect on, we collect. What people like you don't seem to realize is that we are everywhere. Our agents forswear sleep.”